This 5-minute video has Google Chairman Eric Schmidt describing fundamental change that needs to be made for industries to genuinely be transformed into the future. After describing how most of the money is still going to the incumbents, Schmidt says: “Change has to occur from the private sector; it has to occur from enlightened leadership, and; it has to occur in areas where money is being made. . . .  I would argue that Google is as successful as it is primarily because of the openness of the Internet.”

HT: Jeff Jarvis

I’m heading for the airport, anticipating meeting up with the Traveling Geeks. Look for posts, pix, maybe streaming video next week.

This week’s Carnival at Rudy deWaele’s m-trends.org includes a featured review of Mark A.M. Kramer’s  post about Citizens as Sensors. The always very original Rudy illustrates his Carnival with a mobile Medusa - as you can see here from hair her hair.

For the past two days I have been attending the Personal Democracy Forum 09 in New York City. As I said here at SmartMobs after the first day, the event was a sweet spot in the ongoings of political operatives, with many of the key operatives in attendance. (Thanks to Jay Bryant for the image of the operatives.)

Although the organizers strive to balance the annual forum, this is Obama’s year and his euphoric minions dominated things. As an “old pol,” I was fascinated by the rhapsodies to digital organization and tools. Having spent a decade over forty years ago participating in winning election campaigns with none of the stuff they talked about at PdF09, I was looking to learn how the digitization and virtual networking have really changed things, if they have. I am still not sure.

One thing I did learn is that the government sector may well be about to be knocked on its heels by the spontaneous stuff networks do, just as have other major sectors including commerce, entertainment, communication, and more.

One by one the speakers from the Obama administration told us how they are setting up online mechanisms by which citizen opinion will flow in to help in their new way of “governance.” Is that really what is going to happen? Will citizen input be accepted and put to use by the establishment? That is not what happened with the music industry. That is happening not so much with newspapers and other top-down media. That is certainly not what happened in Moldavo’s Twitter Revolution, or Iran. It was interesting to hear one White House panelist describe what her team did when a large number of inquiries about the President’s citizenship came into an open online suggestions tool they were operating out of the White House. She told us she was surprised that such questions would be sent in, and that her White House team took care of it by degrading the Presidential citizen category incoming from the public as they would have questions, as she put it, about aliens from outer space.

There is a general assumption that during the Presidential election last year team Obama used the Internet to open some new sort of way for support to flow to candidate Obama. I know from my own experience that there have long been analog ways to do the same thing. The “I like Ike” cascade in 1952 produced more of a public landslide victory than what occurred in 2008. Political campaigns have always found ways to attract and cluster supporters. Today’s tools are 3×5 index cards gone hyper and viral.

But the Obama efforts they talk about to involve networks in governance may be about to create something that IS completely new. Network science is about emergence. Patterns form in networks from the aggregation of many individual nodes. The sovereignty of the individual node seems very hopeful to me for the future of democracy, not just in the United States, but worldwide. In the political and governance context, nodes in a network are individual citizens. There is no top down from which to exercise control in a network that will force favorable patterns to emerge — a really big bummer for top guys with controlling urges.

I just posted Crap Detection 101 to my SFGate “City Brights” blog:

Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.

The first thing we all need to know about information online is how to detect crap - a technical term I use for information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception. Learning to be a critical consumer of Webinfo is not rocket science. It’s not even algebra. Becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of web credibility testing is easier than learning the multiplication tables. The hard part, as always, is the exercise of flabby think-for-yourself muscles.

The issue of info pollution has been on my mind since at least 1994, when I wrote “The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons” about the infamous Canter and Siegel - the first Internet spammers. A few years later, I personally confronted the importance of teaching information literacy to 14 year olds when I watched my daughter come of age at the same time online search engines became available. I sat down in front of the circa-1999 computer with my daughter and explained that most of the books she could get from the library could be counted on to be factually accurate. But when you enter words into a search engine, there is no guarantee that your search will lead you to accurate information. “You have to do some investigation before you accept anything you find online,” I warned her.

In Barcelona November 21-22, 2009, the first Personal Democracy Forum will convene outside the USA. It will be held, at the Torre Agbar, the striking tower shown in the image with this post. The Barcelona setting is in the calibre of salon that this week’s New York City PdF09 attendees are enjoying in the edgy 21st century opulence of the new Jazz at Lincoln Center complex. The assembled digital types, politicos that they are and mostly incumbents, seem very much home in the handsome halls.

This morning I am returning for the second day of NYC PdF09. The event has hit a sweet spot in political timing — and is fabulous. I will post some more about its smartmobby aspects later.

For now, here are some things that define this sweet spot in the ongoings of political operatives:
Many key players from the winning Obama campaign are present, and telling us why they think they did so well. Lots of government digital types are chewing on how to be better at Web stuff and be more transparent. Sunshine pols are networking and speaking up — again the hot word is “transparency” (ok, sounds good). Republican operative brass are talking about the future with open ears and knowing smiles. One bummer: Mayor Bloomberg showed up only by Skype, missing the sweet spot mark by being too busy to come Uptown.

The passing of Michael Jackson has spurred “flash-mob-esque” activity. this video depicts a flashmob which occurred yesterday at Karlsplatz in Vienna, Austria.

YouTube - mass moonwalk vienna

Source: Super-Fi

The Personal Democracy Forum blog “techPresident” has a post today about an e-book coming out next month. The subject of the e-book is how the Presidential candidates tried to use the Internet. We learn that for each of the candidates there were times when an unruly public caused some difficulty:

Regardless of how well they actually used it, every presidential candidate from Mitt Romney to Mike Gravel had a presence of some kind online, though none built anything as comprehensive as Obama’s. But even the best campaigns — including his — were doomed to be overshadowed at times by the voices of an unruly public. Despite their best efforts, the audience kept stealing the spotlight from the actors.

For instance, every serious candidate suffered from some piece of unflattering content spread online from person to person: McCain sang “Bomb, Bomb Iran,” Edwards had his two-minute hair-brushing episode, Clinton was greeted with children and flowers while landing “under sniper fire,” and a comparison of Mitt Romney’s past and current statements on abortion rights made for a fascinating study in contrast. Barack Obama was certainly not immune, particularly since his background set him up for persistent attempts to identify him as “other.”

Earlier this week SmartMobs highlighted a presentation given at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona regarding Citizens as Sensors. Today, we deep-link to an article from h+ describing the Open Source Sensing initiative.

“Cheap, ubiquitous sensing has the potential to turn the worlds of privacy and civil rights upside-down,” says Brad Templeton, a futurist and civil rights activist who chairs the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Source:We the People are the Watchers | h+ Magazine

Thank you David Cassel for the tip!

Here’s a piece I wrote for Computerworld suggesting that we are transitioning from online social media to an era of social mobile media or “SoMo”.

“Social media is literally on the move. While useful for anonymous and asynchronous communications, computer-based social media is rapidly becoming old school. In comparison, mobile social media is personal and dynamic — and more closely tied to how people engage in the real world. SoMo not only provides us the freedom to meet each other where we are, it also gives computing a distinctly human face.”